The Sea

This year, we are teaming up with Marco Scaramuccia of Pequod Boat Tours in Levanto to offer daily sunset boat tours of the stupendous Levanto coastline. This summer season, the Pequod will sail every evening for a once-in-a-lifetime boat tour. The coastline around Levanto is unmatchable and pristine, the waters crystal clear, […]

Punta Mesco, the imposing treeless rock that juts up out of the Mediterranean and marks the northwest boundary of the Cinque Terre, is actually fifty percent within the confines of Levanto. But since you can’t actually see it from Levanto unless you are in a boat, it’s probably fair that […]

Liguria is, more than anything else, a long thin coastal stretch with mountains at its shoulders, and its entire complex of history, culture, and society is tied up to the sea and these geographical factors. And so the winds of Liguria are of great importance. There’s an easterly wind howling […]

You don’t move to the coast if you don’t like the water, and you don’t move to the Mediterranean coast if you don’t like to swim. The water is clean, blue, warm, surrounded by mountains, and its shores are populated by beautiful people. What else do you want? When I moved […]

There is a relatively new tradition in Levanto, going back 12 consecutive years, of diving into the Mediterranean at noon on New Year’s Day. It’s called “Il Cimento”, a word that I still have not been able to translate. Last year, for our first New Year’s in Levanto, we watched […]

It is a foul and nasty night out there, just as it’s been a foul and nasty day, but that only serves to remind me that only a week ago, that’s right, on October 23, I took my last swim in the Mediterranean for the year 2012. My first dip […]

Though I have lived in Italy for over 11 years, I have never stopped to really ask myself what this holiday Ferragosto is all about. For those of you who don’t know, Ferragosto, which falls on the 15th of August, is a national Italian holiday on which it is canonical to […]

We were out on a traditional fishing boat recently checking out a fabulous tour of the Cinque Terre, when we got to talking fish with the boat captain, Angelo. He’s the latest in a long line of fishermen that goes back ten generations in Monterosso, so he ought to know […]

This year’s Festa del Mare in Levanto is upon us. Though there have been a few related happenings in the preceding days, the real action gets started tomorrow, Tuesday July 24, and has it’s big finish on Wednesday July 25. Those of you who have seen video of Italian Sea […]

I don’t remember the last time I was out on a pedalò, but I suspect I was just a kid, and the location was some kind of artificial lake in Connecticut or Texas or in Central Park for all I know. But I’ll admit, I wasn’t exactly bursting with […]